


faces in your dreams

by nysscientia



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: BAMF Peggy Carter, F/F, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-11
Updated: 2014-09-11
Packaged: 2018-02-17 00:56:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2291051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nysscientia/pseuds/nysscientia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s got a hat pulled down low– something that could pass as a thrift-store find or a modern attempt at vintage, but Natasha would bet otherwise– and her clothes are nondescript.  Everything about her is utilitarian and sort of abstractly feminine; just enough personality not to catch the eye of someone looking for enemy agents, but nothing really memorable about her.  She doesn’t even catch Sam’s attention, and he’s been hyper-alert to the point of paranoia ever since Project Insight.  Natasha, though, wouldn’t pass her over in a crowd of hundreds, no matter what she wore– her face is too familiar.</p>
<p>“Secure a room,” Natasha murmurs, hand on Sam’s shoulder as she slips cash into his hand.  He takes the litas, looks between Natasha and the woman, and nods.  Then he disappears in the opposite direction.</p>
<p>Natasha drifts into the crowd, following from a few blocks behind until the woman disappears down an alley.  Then she checks herself for tails, decides she’s not being tracked, and sprints to catch up.  Before Steve and Sam, Natasha’s only worked comfortably with two partners: Clint– and the woman currently leaning against the alley wall like she’s been waiting for the Black Widow to arrive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	faces in your dreams

**Author's Note:**

> References some canonical psychological trauma and memory loss.

They split up.  Steve’s tracking an informant.  It’s most likely a dead end, but Natasha’s instincts to hoard intel are proving difficult to quash, and he wanted to follow the trail, so she lets him go.  She and Sam infiltrate a suspected HYDRA base south of Olevsk; Sam finds nothing but a recently-evacuated warehouse, and Natasha finds the clues that lead them to Dubrovitsya.  
  
They haven’t even been over the border for a full day when Natasha spots her.  
  
She’s got a hat pulled down low– something that could pass as a thrift-store find or a modern attempt at vintage, but Natasha would bet otherwise– and her clothes are nondescript.  Everything about her is utilitarian and sort of abstractly feminine; just enough personality not to catch the eye of someone looking for enemy agents, but nothing really memorable about her.  She doesn’t even catch Sam’s attention, and he’s been hyper-alert to the point of paranoia ever since Project Insight.  Natasha, though, wouldn’t pass her over in a crowd of hundreds, no matter what she wore– her face is too familiar.  
  
“Secure a room,” Natasha murmurs, hand on Sam’s shoulder as she slips cash into his hand.  He takes the litas, looks between Natasha and the woman, and nods.  Then he disappears in the opposite direction.  
  
A few weeks with Sam has Natasha reconsidering why she’s preferred working alone for all these years.  
  
Natasha drifts into the crowd, following from a few blocks behind until the woman disappears down an alley.  Then she checks herself for tails, decides she’s not being tracked, and sprints to catch up.  Before Steve and Sam, Natasha’s only worked comfortably with two partners: Clint– and the woman currently leaning against the alley wall like she’s been waiting for the Black Widow to arrive.  
  
“Didn’t expect to see you here,” the woman says, expression blank and eyes alight.  
  
Natasha resists the smile tugging at her own lips, narrows her eyes instead.  “Who are you here for?”  
  
“Complicated,” the woman replies, accent crisp and clean and terribly out of place in the alley’s dank.  “Where exactly are we?”  
  
Natasha stops her approach, taken aback.  “Lithuania,” she answers.  
  
The woman consults her watch, then reaches into her coat pocket to examine several papers and– something that can only be Stark tech, but which Natasha’s never seen before, not even in a workshop.  
  
She must not see what she was hoping for, because the woman sighs and shoves everything back into her coat.  None of this is adding up.  Natasha’s fingers creep towards the small of her back, where she’s stashed one of her smallest guns.  The woman sighs, mutters something to herself about ‘getting us nowhere,’ then seems to steel herself and meets Natasha’s eyes.  
  
“Natalia,” she says.  “I seem to have missed my rendezvous.  Would you happen to be tracking a group of former HYDRA agents?”  
  
Natasha does a dozen calculations in her head and comes up with a handful of nonsense.  She takes a few even breaths through her nose, then takes the only course of action left in a scenario like this: follows her gut.  
  
“Depends,” she says.  “Do you have any identification on you, Agent Carter?”  
  
-  
  
“Yes, it’s her,” Natasha says as she sweeps into the hostel room Sam’s rented.  She shoves her pack at him as she brushes past, and he catches it on instinct, expression blank the way it gets when he’s debating whether to follow an order.  “Don’t ask how or why, you’re nowhere near clearance for that.”  
  
“Neither are you,” Sam says, taking Natasha’s pack and hanging it in the room’s narrow chest of drawers.  Its veneer is chipping.  
  
Peggy doesn’t stop her slow lap around their room, but she does glance up at that.  
  
“Rogue, or civilian?” she says.  She sounds more curious than concerned.  
  
Natasha shrugs.  “Not so different.”  
  
Peggy makes a sound of acknowledgement and goes back to examining the view from their window.  Natasha sits on one of the two double beds, and it creaks tiredly.  She draws a knife from her boot, the gun from her waistband, shrugs out of her coat.  
  
Sam must come to some kind of decision, because he crosses to the particleboard table crammed into the corner of the room and withdraws Natasha’s laptop from her pack.  He reaches into a side pocket for the first flash drive, into the secret pocket for the second, and then gets started on setting up a secure connection.  
  
Peggy drifts over, watching the process with some interest.  Natasha still hasn’t figured out if Peggy’s response to modern technology is the result of unfamiliarity or the gathering of reference points.  She hasn’t turned that particular puzzle over in her mind since–  
  
“2006,” Peggy says, and when Natasha looks up she’s watching her, back turned to Sam and the laptop.  Natasha cocks her head.  
  
“The last time we worked together,” Peggy continues.  “You haven’t seen me since 2006.”  
  
“But you’ve seen me?” Natasha asks, and Peggy does smile then.  
  
“I don’t know why it ever surprises me anymore when you do that,” she replies.  She crosses the room, sits on the corner of the bed opposite Natasha.  
  
“It’s, what– October of 2013?  You’ve been hard to miss,” she adds, tilting her head towards the television.  
  
Natasha opens her mouth, but whatever she would’ve said is interrupted by Sam turning in his seat, leaning forward and resting elbows on knees.  
  
“You worked together in 2006,” he says to Peggy.  “Weren’t you born in like 1920?”  
  
“1919, but a lady never reveals her age,” Peggy replies immediately.  Natasha doesn’t bother covering a smirk.  
  
No one says anything for a second, and then Sam shrugs.  “And we’re tailing Captain America’s childhood friend,” he says, like he’s conceding a point in an argument.  “I’m starting to seriously wonder what was in the water in the forties.”  
  
“On that topic,” Peggy says, breaking eye contact with Natasha for the first time since sitting down.  Natasha, foolishly, feels colder.  “Where is the good Captain?”  
  
“En route,” Natasha answers.  Sam pulls up their files, apparently following Natasha’s lead in letting Peggy in on the search, and the conversation turns to business.  
  
It’s uncomfortably familiar, discussing strategy Peggy.  She leans over Natasha’s shoulder and asks few but pointed questions, hand resting comfortably on Natasha’s arm when she braces to trace a border on the screen.  
  
Natasha presses her lips together and focuses on the mission.  
  
-  
  
Sam stopped to pick up food, cold sandwiches and potato chips and packages of off-brand yogurt and dried fruit.  After the planning is done, though– when they reach the point in the evening when Natasha takes out a paperback and he switches on some handheld gaming system or another– he pleads hunger and disappears from the hostel anyway.  
  
Natasha watches his silhouette grow smaller on the sidewalk below their window, feeling very aware of Peggy on the other side of the room, and has a pang of gratitude for Sam, sudden and sharp.  
  
When he rounds a corner, Natasha turns.  She reaches into the shopping bag he left and pulls out a yogurt.  It takes her a moment to puzzle out what she can use as a spoon, finally settles on a coffee stirrer from the side table.  
  
“I had thought maybe you were out of the field altogether,” Peggy says into the silence.  
  
Natasha stirs her yogurt, watches fruit chunks disappear into the milky white.  “Just deeper cover.”  
  
Then, before she can consider the consequences, she blurts out, “I thought I had made you up.”  
  
Peggy goes unnaturally still.  “Oh?”  
  
Natasha takes a bite of yogurt, considers how to explain.  
  
“They say that you don’t invent faces in your dreams,” she says, finally.  “That when you dream of someone you don’t recognize, your subconscious is drawing from people you’ve seen.  Strangers, actors from a movie you don’t really remember.”  
  
Peggy’s head inclines for a second, almost a nod.  She doesn’t say anything.  
  
“I thought maybe– Captain America was part of the program’s inspiration, so they showed us all the reels,” Natasha continues.  “Maybe the reason I remembered you was because– my mind borrowed Peggy Carter’s face from a film.”  
  
She pauses.  Takes a steadying breath.  
  
“To replace someone they’d taken from me,” Natasha finishes, and as soon as the words are out of her mouth Peggy is up from the bed, crossing the room, kneeling at Natasha’s feet.  
  
“Natalia Romanova,” Peggy says, “I am so sorry that I can’t tell you more about where I was, or why I’m here now.”  
  
Her hands rest on Natasha’s knees, gently nudge them apart.  She slips into the space between Natasha’s thighs and takes Natasha’s hands into her own.  
  
“But I am most certainly here, and I swear to you that it was me then, too,” she murmurs, pressing the words into Natasha’s palm.  She follows the assurance with a kiss, then another, inside Natasha’s wrist, across her knuckles.  
  
Natasha slips the hand under Peggy’s jaw, tilts her face up.  Peggy stares up at her, and her eyes are exactly as Natasha remembers them, steely and hard and so warm.  Natasha draws her up and Peggy surges forward to meet her, suddenly everywhere, enveloping.  
  
Peggy’s kisses are achingly familiar, their mouths lining up and bodies remembering– like this was only yesterday, like they were ever just lovers and not enemies and then tentative partners, alliances like knots too complicated to tease apart.  
  
Wrapping her arms around Natasha’s waist, Peggy tugs her to standing, just a little too rough.  She whirls her around, shoves, and Natasha lets herself fall against the old hostel bed.  It lets out an ominous groan when she bounces against the mattress, and Natasha smiles almost despite herself.  
  
Peggy’s answering smirk is small, almost sad.  It’s one of the first things Natasha noticed about her, back then– the way all of her expressions seem to contain shadows of other emotions, sadness and determination accompanying even raucous laughter.  
  
Then Peggy’s kneeling over her, crawling up the bed, and Natasha’s mind is nowhere but here and now.  
  
Peggy’s hands know Natasha’s body in a way no one else’s could.  Natasha’s last questions about their past shake apart when she comes, fingernails raking down Peggy’s back, Peggy panting into the hollow of Natasha’s throat.  
  
-  
  
Natasha doesn’t bother cleaning the lipstick smudges from her mouth or neck before Sam gets back.


End file.
